Public to Be Scanned in Real Time as Police Body Cameras May Soon Get Facial Recognition
Police departments across the country could soon have access to facial recognition technology in the Breathalyzer tests they give and the body cameras they wear.
By Jack Burns
TheFreeThoughtProject.com
May 5, 2018
New innovations in technology are allowing police officers to contribute to a growing database by implementing facial recognition software in Breathalyzer tests and body cameras.
The largest maker of body cameras in the United States, Axon, announced last week that it has purchased two artificial intelligence companies and it is creating an ethics board for the purpose of preparing to use the technology with its current products.
Despite acknowledging the “bias and misuse” that will likely take place with such a system, the company’s founder, Rick Smith argues that the tech’s benefits cannot be ignored. “I don’t think it’s an optimal solution, the world we’re in today, that catching dangerous people should just be left up to random chance, or expecting police officers to remember who they’re looking for,” he told WaPost. “It would be both naive and counterproductive to say law enforcement shouldn’t have these new technologies. They’re going to, and I think they’re going to need them. We can’t have police in the 2020s policing with technologies from the 1990s.”
Both China and the UK — two major police states — already deploy cameras that use facial recognition in public.
In a letter to Axon, 42 groups including the ACLU, NAACP, and the National Urban League pointing out the police state dangers associated with such a program, calling it “categorically unethical to deploy.”
Axon has a responsibility to ensure that its present and future products, including AI-based products, don’t drive unfair or unethical outcomes or amplify racial inequities in policing. Axon acknowledges this responsibility—the company states that it “fully recognize[s] the complexities and sensitivities around technology in law enforcement, and [is] committed to getting it right.”
Certain products are categorically unethical to deploy. Chief among these is real-time face recognition analysis of live video captured by body-worn cameras. Axon must not offer or enable this feature. Real-time face recognition would chill the constitutional freedoms of speech and association, especially at political protests….Real-time face recognition could also prime officers to perceive individuals as more dangerous than they really are and to use more force than the situation requires. No policy or safeguard can mitigate these risks sufficiently well for real-time face recognition ever to be marketable.
But Axon is not alone in their police state profiteering, in order for the prison industrial complex to be fed a constant stream of inmates, allowing prison corporations, county jails, and police departments to profit off of arrests, the charging of an impaired driver must be streamlined.
The Rest…HERE
